That other build after CES looks neat. I wish we had a chance at seeing an even earlier build, or getting to see what BlueSky's version looked like. There's so much out there that doesn't seem like it would ever turn up.

However, more importantly, a month later they have off-screen photos of the third prototype, which suggests it may have appeared at an event around August-ish 1993. Aladdin doesn't seem to have appeared at ECTS Autumn 1993 so we can rule that one out.

Early 1993: BlueSky stuff
Late May? 1993: SCES demo.
27th June 1993: this prototype
July/early August-ish 1993: third prototype
August 1993: final game (according to the ROM)
October/November 1993: Final game is released

And this is when I load the final game save state into the beta game and here is the strange results.

Yeah this is the results everyone.
I will do this for EVERY level back and forth between the beta and the final ver.

Click to expand...

As GerbilSoft pointed out, the first screenshot is likely to be useless (no offense). However, this second one intrigued me. As you probably noticed, the final game crashes to psychedelic background colors. But this screenshot suggests that the prototype jumps to a proper exception handler instead of doing weird palette cycling.

So I took a crack at making the prototype crash myself.

Of course, this is kind of a "no shit" thing because it is very important for developers to know exactly what is causing crashes during the development process. I just wonder why it was removed in the final game. That date of January 1991 is also interesting (imo).

I don't know if Sega had this policy, but Nintendo required developers to disable crash dump screens prior to release. One well-known example is The New Tetris for N64. There was a reproducible crash bug that they couldn't fix in time for release, so they replaced the crash dump screen with a "secret cheat" message (using what looks like the Commodore 64 font :v.

EDIT: Actually, I'm not sure if it's the crash dump that they had to disable, or just fix all crash bugs in general. TCRF says "the developer had to close out all crashing bugs in order to ship".)

And this is when I load the final game save state into the beta game and here is the strange results.

Yeah this is the results everyone.
I will do this for EVERY level back and forth between the beta and the final ver.

Click to expand...

As GerbilSoft pointed out, the first screenshot is likely to be useless (no offense). However, this second one intrigued me. As you probably noticed, the final game crashes to psychedelic background colors. But this screenshot suggests that the prototype jumps to a proper exception handler instead of doing weird palette cycling.

So I took a crack at making the prototype crash myself.

Of course, this is kind of a "no shit" thing because it is very important for developers to know exactly what is causing crashes during the development process. I just wonder why it was removed in the final game. That date of January 1991 is also interesting (imo).

Something that is really downplayed in the announcement is that Rich made what is essentially a "day one patch" for the Genesis version of Aladdin, using the original source code and design doc as reference. Fixed bugs, improved collision, etc. without outright changing the game.

So how long until Toy Story gets the same treatment. The public knows for a fact the source codes and design docs still exist for it.

Click to expand...

With Jon Burton being as active as he is I wouldn't be surprised if he was willing to give that game a "director's cut" treatment on a re-release the same way he did for Sonic 3D. I believe he even brought it up in one of his YouTube videos.

From what I've seen (and it's surprisingly hard to find footage), they're calling the prototype "demo version" (with references to SCES 1993) and it's uh... probably the same build as in this topic.

Except they're skipping the level select-y options screen and the Sega logo (though not Virgin?) and maybe dictating the order in which levels are played. I don't know the prototype well enough - maybe bits are being missed this way, dunno.

There's plenty of behind the scenes material mind you. Not sure how much of it is "new" (or how much they're avoiding mentioning the words "Sega" or "Nintendo") but something to explore at a later date. I'm not sure how much the target audience are interested in such things.